Omni

The portable speaker market has exploded in recent years with an ever growing eclectic mix of form factors and technology. Bowers and Wilkins set the open brief – How can the brand enter the market with their own portable speaker?

Bowers & Wilkins have an almost cult following in the hi-fi world, so I interviewed a number of collectors simply asking the question ‘Why Bowers & Wilkins and why high fidelity audio?’

The answer – the pursuit of perfection, a live untainted sound as if the artist was in the room with them.

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It was identified that there was an opportunity for Bowers & Wilkins to fuse their consumer level products with their high end heritage by creating a speaker with a form driven entirely by the pursuit of the best possible sound rendition.

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The size of speaker and surrounding enclosure has a direct impact on the quality of sound reproduction. So although a pocketable speaker may be great for taking out and about, it isn’t going to sound all that great. Exploration was undertaken into the physics of speaker performance with concentration on developing a solution that would produce the best sounding audio but at a size small enough to be considered portable.

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The Bowers and Wilkins Omni pays homage to the heritage of the brand by creating a form driven by the pursuit of perfect sound reproduction. The omnidirectional speaker technology creates high quality audio like no other, allowing the user to experience music as it was meant to be heard…anywhere.

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A detailed CAD model of the speaker was constructed using component dimensions and DFM considerations in order to further develop the product form.